I’m the sysadmin for a smallish retailer/distributer and we use Netsuite for accounting. The issue is this. . . From time to time, no workstation on the network (including the server) is able to access Netsuite.com, or the site will load incredibly slowly and time out. This can happen on login or when users query a record or whenever. The problem is extremely sporadic and it is ONLY with Netsuite. When the site is having trouble, all other sites work fine. However, we can log into Netsuite from outside the network and have none of the same slowness or timeouts.
The really weird part is that when I restart the server (Win 2003 Enterprise), people are able to use the site just fine for minutes, hours, or days – then it goes back down. Simply clearing caches or restarting DNS does not have the same effect. I went through all sorts of machinations last summer to figure it out, including completely reinstalling DNS on the server, upgrading the network switch, reconfiguring IPs, etc. It only seems to happen in the summer, when we have the most staff and are the busiest.
I don’t think the problem is with the server being overly burdened, as it’s a very robust machine for the size of the network. DNS errors are infrequent to non-existent in the logs and don’t correspond to the downtime. I’ve considered that it might be a bandwidth issue or our ISP not clearing caches (and of course, Netsuite has its own problems), but then I’m not sure why it works for a while when the server is rebooted.
Does anyone have ideas or suggestions for me? I can’t seem to find much of anything online to point me in the right direction.